Southwest Energy Development and Drought (SWEDD)

Southwest Energy Development and Drought (SWEDD)

Science Center Objects

Deserts of the southwestern US are replete with oil and gas deposits as well as sites for solar, wind, and geothermal energy production. In the past, many of these resources have been too expensive to develop, but increased demand and new technologies have led to an increase in exploration and development. However, desert ecosystems generally have low resilience to disturbance. More frequent, intense droughts forecast for the southwestern US will likely further hamper recovery of disturbed lands. Consequently, there is a need for new science to anticipate and mitigate the effects of energy exploration and development. The Colorado Plateau Region contains approximately 100,000 abandoned and current wells spanning 60 years of activity. These structures are spread over a variety of substrates, climate zones, elevations, and vegetation communities, with varying periods of use and time since abandonment. The overarching goal of this project is to understand how past and current energy development are impacting the social-ecological systems of the Colorado Plateau, and to identify strategies to mitigate deleterious consequences of these activates now and into the future.

Understanding how land use trends impact overall ecosystem and human health is important to managing the vast rangelands of the Colorado Plateau. The region includes spectacular canyons and mountains that draw tourists from around the world. There are also abundant mineral and energy resources that have been extracted since the early 20th century. These land uses often clash and the more than 3-fold increase in annual oil and gas exploration between 1990 and 2010 has disturbed large areas of delicate vegetation and biological soil crust on the Plateau. This begs the question of how quickly these areas recover from the clearing and leveling process associated with the construction and operation of oil and gas well-pads. Increasing levels of dust have been noted in the region since Anglo-colonization due to increased surface disturbance, and the dust has been linked to earlier run-off from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado leading to evaporative losses from the Colorado River – the water supply for tens of millions. So, the goal of this project is to assess the current scope, status, and recovery of lands disturbed by oil and gas development within the context of predicted future droughts. The assessment with then be used to help better plan oil and gas development, and begin testing best rehabilitation methods to restore ecosystems and prevent dust production.

General Methods

Method flowchart showing the Disturbance Automated Reference Toolset (DART) process of assessing ecological recovery. Uses example from a well-pad near the Four Corners region of the Southwest. Click on image to enlarge. (Credit: Travis Nauman, From Nauman et al. (2017)

Assessment of oil and gas pads required an automated approach because there are over 90,000 records of development on the Colorado Plateau. Data from newly created digital soil maps, topography models, and satellite imagery derived geology and vegetation indices were utilized to create a Disturbance Automated Reference Toolset (DART). Since it is impractical to visit 90,000 sites, DART allows use of satellite data to compare vegetation at similar sites nearby to each oil or gas well pad to gauge recovery. A smaller sample of field observations is then used to validate results from DART to make sure they are accurate in assessing vegetation recovery. The assessment from DART is converted into a quantile scale (0-100%) can be compared across large numbers of sites to look at trends in recovery – e.g. sites in certain vegetation types might not recover as well. These trends can then help land managers target areas that need more attention.

Important Results

Well-pads on the Plateau plugged and abandoned between 1997-2005 (~1800 sites) were analyzed after their locations and actual development were verified in Google Earth Pro. DART showed that half of these well pads were below the 20th percentile relative to local vegetation. Over 30% of pads were below the 10th percentile. Well-pads with poor recovery tended to be found in areas with precipitation dominated more by summer monsoons, grasslands, blackbrush (Coleogyne ramosissima) shrublands, and state administered areas. Validation results showed that DART was effective at showing trends in total foliar cover and bare ground exposure, key variables in rangeland health. In particular, DART is good at highlighting areas recovering very poorly with large amounts of exposed bare ground and sparse vegetation cover.

Future Directions

The broad scale evaluation of oil and gas with DART is being expanded to areas outside of just the Colorado Plateau through development of the underlying data needed to run elsewhere. This process can be applied to a variety of land use disturbances and treatments for monitoring.

The evaluation of well pads is also being used to help our land management partners start prioritizing restoration and to guide further science to test effectiveness of rehabilitation techniques being employed at these sites.

The objective of this interdisciplinary research effort is to 1) characterize agents of change important to land management decision makers on the Colorado Plateau; 2) identify and analyze relationships between agents of change and key landscape attributes and processes; 3) collectively assess the influence of agents of change and attributes and processes on the services provided by the...

Big sagebrush ecosystems are a major component of landscapes in the western U.S. and provide vital habitat to a wide array of wildlife species. However, big sagebrush ecosystems have been dramatically impacted by disturbances in the past several decades. This collaborative research between USGS and the University of Wyoming focuses on understanding how climatic and soil conditions influence...

Forests in the semiarid southwestern U.S. are expected to be highly vulnerable to increasing aridity anticipated with climate change. In particular, low elevation forests and the processes of tree regeneration and mortality are likely to be highly susceptible to climate change. This work seeks to characterize how, where and when forest ecosystems will change and identify management...

Land managers face tremendous challenges in the future as drought and climate change alter the abundance, distribution, and interactions of plant species. These challenges will be especially daunting in the southwestern US, which is already experiencing elevated temperatures and prolonged droughts, resulting in reduced soil moisture in an already water-limited environment. These changes will...

The Restoration Assessment and Monitoring Program for the Southwest (RAMPS) seeks to assist U.S. Department of the Interior and other land management agencies and private partners in developing successful restoration strategies for dryland ecosystems of the southwestern United States. Invasive species, drought, habitat loss, fire, urban expansion, and other disturbances have degraded...

Erosion by wind is one of the principal processes associated with land degradation in drylands
and is a signiﬁcant concern to land managers and policymakers globally. In the drylands of North America, millions of tons of soil are lost to wind erosion annually. Of the 60 million ha in the United States identiﬁed as most vulnerable to wind erosion (...

Oil and natural gas development in the western United States has increased substantially in recent decades as technological advances like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made extraction more commercially viable. Oil and gas pads are often developed for production, and then capped, reclaimed, and left to recover when no longer...

Water-limited ecosystems often recover slowly following anthropogenic or natural disturbance. Multitemporal remote sensing can be used to monitor ecosystem recovery after disturbance; however, dryland vegetation cover can be challenging to accurately measure due to sparse cover and spectral confusion between soils and non-photosynthetic vegetation...

A new disturbance automated reference toolset (DART) was developed to monitor human land surface impacts using soil-type and ecological context. DART identifies reference areas with similar soils, topography, and geology; and compares the disturbance condition to the reference area condition using a quantile-based approach based on a satellite...

Numerous ecological site descriptions in the southern Utah portion of the Colorado Plateau can be difficult to navigate, so we held a workshop aimed at adding value and functionality to the current ecological site system.We created new groups of ecological sites and drafted state-and-transition models for these new groups.We were able to distill...

Ecological inventory and monitoring data need referential context for interpretation. Identification of appropriate reference areas of similar ecological potential for site comparison is demonstrated using a newly developed automated reference toolset (ART). Foundational to identification of reference areas was a soil map of particle size in the...

A new complete map of soil series probabilities has been produced for the contiguous United States at a 30 m spatial resolution. This innovative database, named POLARIS, is constructed using available high-resolution geospatial environmental data and a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm (DSMART-HPC) to remap the Soil Survey...

Adaptive management of road networks depends on timely data that accurately reflect the impacts those systems are having on ecosystem processes and associated services. In the absence of reliable data, land managers are left with little more than observations and perceptions to support management decisions of road-associated disturbances. Roads...

These data were compiled for monitoring and analyzing the amount of windblown (aeolian) sediment at 100 cm height near Moab, UT. Big Springs Number Eight (BSNE) field aeolian passive sediment traps are summarized by location and time period in shapefiles. Shapefiles also include attributes used to analyze patterns in the aeolian transport.

These environmental raster covariate, geospatial vector data, and tabular data were compiled as input data for the Automated Reference Toolset (ART) algorithm. These data are a subset of all the environmental raster covariate data used in the ART algorithm.

This raster data depicts the modeled distribution of three grassland states: Biocrust, Grass-bare, and Annualized-bare. We developed models of bare ground, total vegetation, exotic grasses and biological soil crust using spectral data from three year composites of growing season (March-October) Landsat data in Google Earth Engine and field data that were collected over the same period at...

A new scientific approach can now provide regional assessments of land recovery following oil and gas drilling activities, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Several news sources have reported on a recently published paper by Travis Nauman and Mike Duniway titled, “Disturbance automated reference toolset (DART): assessing patterns in ecological recovery from energy development on the Colorado Plateau”.